Melissa McCarty ETH/125 Final Exam: Race and My Community University of Phoenix May 21, 1978 was when I was born, a Caucasian and Native American girl that didn’t know what was ahead of her for the years down the road. Growing up in Columbus, Ohio I was around a mix of different races, cultures and ethnic backgrounds. My name is Melissa McCarty and this paper will provide you an overview of my experiences within my community and focus on ethnicity and the ways that race and ethnicity have shaped my own personal life as well as the way that I am perceived by others. Growing up in Columbus Ohio and having such a fair complexion, I never knew that part of my family were of Native American decent. You see, I was adopted when I was two years old however I stayed within the family so I did not have to adapt to a new family. I quickly learned what my Native American relatives had been through and the hard times that they suffered. Since then, I have had a new outlook on different races, cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Once I was of school age, I attended schools that were diverse and consisted of children of every race and background. I didn’t think anything of it because it was something that I had seen every day in my neighborhood. In the neighborhood that I grew up in, we had people living there that looked like me and others that looked different. I remember asking my mother why they were a different color, or spoke differently than we did. She would always tell me that “it was because God had made them different because he didn’t want everyone to look the same so he put people in different areas of the country in order to help us learn about different things”. I have remembered those

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words to this day and I am glad that I did. The people that were different than us had different types of hair, skin color, facial features, and language that they spoke. In becoming friends with people who were different than me, I noticed that their family traditions were also different than my family. I thought that some of the traditions were very interesting including the way that my African American friends danced. I actually joined an African American dance team and learned the dances of their country and culture. I loved it. When I attended Independence High School, which at the time was one of the

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